South Pacific Commission

The Pacific Community (SPC) is the principal scientific and technical organisation in the Pacific region. It is an international development organisation owned and governed by its 26 country and territory members. With more than 600 staff, the organisation's headquarters are in Nouméa, New Caledonia, and it has regional offices in Suva, Fiji, and Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia, as well as a country office in Honiara, Solomon Islands, and field staff in other Pacific locations. Its working languages are English and French.

The Pacific Community was founded in 1947 as the South Pacific Commission by six developed countries with an interest in the region:

For reasons either of reduced development interest in the Pacific Islands region or a desire to concentrate assistance in other areas of greater poverty, two founding members have since withdrawn from SPC: the Netherlands in 1962 and the United Kingdom in 1994 and – after rejoining in 1998 – again in 2004.

SPC's founding charter is the Canberra Agreement. In the aftermath of World War II, the six colonial powers which created the SPC arguably intended it to secure Western political and military interests in the postwar Pacific.

From the start, SPC's role was constrained, and the invitation from Australia and New Zealand to the US, France, Netherlands and the UK to participate in a South Seas Commission Conference in 1947 included the statement that "the [South Pacific] Commission to be set up should not be empowered to deal in any way with political matters or questions of defense or security" This constraint on discussion (particularly the constraint on discussing nuclear weapons testing in the region) led, eventually, to the creation of the South Pacific Forum (now Pacific Islands Forum), which not only excluded the more distant "metropolitan" powers of France, UK and USA, but also their Pacific Island territories.

Today, SPC is the principal scientific and technical organisation in the Pacific region.

SPC works closely with donor and technical assistance organisations such as AusAID, the European Union, FAO, the United Nations, New Zealand Aid Programme and CTA.

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